Respect to @nic__carter for not only trashing the over-use and mis-use of the term "blockchain," but acknowledging that we're stuck with it (for now). I faced this challenge with my book and went with the familiar term, despite its difficulties. https://t.co/cR6z1y5vUg

Can't emphasize enough that the blockchain is *not* the innovation behind bitcoin. The real, game-changing innovation was "in the merging of the computational hardness of adding new entries to the chain with the linked list." #Bitcoin is the result. https://t.co/0MNXDvYMtB

Taking that a bit out of context, I think the article is talking about using a linked list like structure to make a blockchain. It even says "not the first of it's kind" right after, I don't think he's talking about linked lists in general.

Well, it says “may”. You can make any statement trueish by adding a “may”.
As in, “Donald Trump **may** have created the first popular, widely-used alternating current electrical system”.
He didn’t, obviously, but he **may** have.

TV ads for IBM blare out promises about revolutionizing tomato-tracking with Blockchain

IBM is pretty desperate. They've consistently been declining in every financial category YoY for a decade. They tried to hop on the blockchain stock bandwagon at the beginning of the year and were the only public company that actually had the means to do something blockchainey. Eventually they will go the way of GE.

President Bill Clinton said of blockchain: “the permutations and possibilities are staggeringly great.”

At a crypto convention, where he was paid to speak. Butters eat the fuck out of these headlines of "former Treasury/Fed member/banking exec say blockchain is ReVoLuTiOnArY" even though these people are on paid speaking circuits literally saying whatever the fuck the promoters want for a check.

>IBM is pretty desperate. They've consistently been declining in every financial category YoY for a decade.
For six years, not a decade. And they actually grew in the early part of this year for the first time in those six. That's going to be offset by higher taxes this year (they expect to pay 16% this year, up from 14% last year) but is still positive revenue growth.
And really, they're shrinking because their market (heavy iron enterprise servers, high-performance super computer clusters) is shrinking. But they've been reducing costs and still make north of 50 billion a year, they're hardly in a tailspin. Hell, their stock price is up 2 percent this year.

>President Bill Clinton said of blockchain: “**the permutations and possibilities are staggeringly great**.”
>
>At a crypto convention, where he was paid to speak.
But he was right, the possibilities are endless:
1. You can lose all of your coinz through user error
2. You can lose all of your coinz by keeping the private key on an old hard-drive and throwing it into land fill
3. You can lose all of your coinz by keeping the private key on paper wallet and losing it or washing it in your jeans pocket
4. You can lose all of your coinz through hardware wallet issues
5. You can lose all of your coinz by not securing your computer
6. You can lose all of your coinz by NOT following every point in the 92 page "how to use Bitcoin" document
7. You can lose all of your coinz even AFTER following every point in the 92 page "how to use Bitcoin" document
8. You can lose all of your coinz by keeping them on a corrupt exchange
9. You can lose all of your coinz by going LONG and being wiped out by 1 millisec of exchange fraud
10. You can lose all of your coinz by going SHORT and being wiped out by 1 millisec of exchange fraud
11. You can lose all of your coinz by them crashing in value
12. You can lose all of your coinz by making lots of trades and now it's TAX time
13. You can lose all of your coinz by being hacked
14. You can lose all of your coinz by sharing your private key with an ex-gf/bf
15. You can lose all of your coinz via ransom / extortion
16. You can lose all of your coinz by any number of scams within scams
And on and on it goes. The sky really is the limit. :)

What I don't get is the rampant application of blockchain to things that don't need it.
I saw a company talking the other day about how they were using blockchain for something about their internal data warehousing, which... doesn't make sense. Either they're lying (my guess), or they're idiots.

It's all hype. Hype to bring in customers and also, one explanation I have heard, hype for IT departments to get some extra funding from their managers. Whether they've implemented a blockchain backed database, is another thing, and whether they implemented one but are still using the old system for real operations yet another. The hype value is worth more than the tech value.
Remember the hype nosql databases were getting some years ago? They were also getting put into systems where a good old fashioned relational database was way more appropriate, just to join the hype train.

They'd lap that shit up. [The ad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qPyaqeJ2CY) even ends:
> Built to run on the IBM cloud.
Any PHBs who can't claim they've got *something* running on the cloud by now probably feel a bit nervous. Getting a cloud based **blockchain** would make them the talk of the town!

In all fairness, it's quite the niche culture going on right now in Germany to "know where your food is coming from" type thing.
Not saying blockchain is the solution, just saying to some people it is a problem.

The "blockchain to multiple copies of an excel spreadsheet" extension should be installed on all browsers and enabled by default. Several years and several crashes and hacks and countless scams and fake startups later, and people still don't get it. I can't see any other way to stop the stupid.

A Thompson Reuters recruiter recently contacted me looking for a neuro-linguistic programming expert to help them with their new ai blockchain chatbot. It's driving me insane.